It has been while since I wrote about of my
photo impression technique. I have been experimenting with a range of the little tweaks available
mosaic creator software, that I use. Specifically I am looking for ways to bring the method more closely aligned to how a painter would approach the same picture. I'm also trying to avoid the viewers first reaction being "Oh, that’s just been PhotoShopped”.
This is photo of Thai, a fellow student at the
Victorian Artist Society. The photo is definitely not great in a normal portrait sense, her face is cut off, eyes not look at you etc. but I like the composition and her concentration on her painting task. So here is a little walk through of some important steps I follow when I create a Photo Impression.
Importance of Colour
If I can get the colour balance and harmonies right, I know
I will have moved much closer to seeing the image through an artist's eye, rather than a camera lens. An artist (and often me) may refer to a colour wheel and look for harmonic and complementary colours. Reducing the palette of colours, to just these colours and many of which the image and creates interest for the viewer. At
this traditional approach is not the only way, there are now many on- line colour scheme pickers, for web sites, such as paint and just fun. Here are I have used fd flickr toy’s
palette generator. You just select from your flickr or facebook photostream or upload a photo and it generates an harmonious colour scheme based on a dominant colours in the photo. I can then select the library of sub images for my tiles in these colours. Picasa’a experimental search for …
colour, has been very useful here, but this still a very manual process. For this photo impression I am using especially created sub tiles that are computer generated mathematical shapes,
fractals, generated using the
Apophysis programme.
Mark Making
The other area, where I can get the photo impressions to resemble an artist's work, using in the mark making. Here it is the texture within the tiles and shape of the tiles themselves that can be harnessed to reflect the personal dabs and strokes of an artist. This is where a lot of artistic style and individuality lies. Those marks can make any work interesting and accessible, or just messy and confusing. I haven't found anything yet to best cho
ose the tile textures and shapes, that is still a very personal decision. However there are some nice tools in mosaic creator to let your marks best fit the original image. These are found under the cell filling tab, moving the cell recognition quality slider to the left (best quality) significantly slows the mosaic building process from minutes to possibly a hours, but it does force a more extensive search for an appropriate tile. One had matches the distribution of terms in the source cell. I also find reducing local duplicity (a measure of how many times a tile is duplicated)
help your eye flow over the image. Making it less likely computer generated mosaic. The selection of tile/cell shape also has a big affect on the surface texture of the resulting image. I find I always need to experiment with a range of shapes before I am happy with the final photo impression.
When I think of highkey in art I think of the impressionist, they painted light as colour, shunning the murky tonal focus of the art academies of their day. Whilst the french impressionist are well known, few know of a small group of Australian painters usually called the Heidelberg School following the same ideas at roughly the same time. I have always loved their work as a lot of it was painted in the area I grew up and I do like Charles Conder’s “A Holiday at Mentone”. The old baths are no longer there but I can remember them and the white cliffs (also no longer visiable), The strands of dried sea weed still frequently can be seen and the beach and its promenade are still a popular stop on a sunny day. I earnt my first swimming certificate here. I am also a member of the Victorian Artist Society and this painting was first exhibited in their Spring Exhibition of 1888. I have also visited this site previously to test out an upgrade to my homemade tripod watercolour easel. So there is plenty to connect me and a self portrait to this site. 
I actually took this photo a few weeks ago on a beautifully sunny spring day. Forgetting somewhat that Australian light (even in early spring) is very harsh and contrasty. So I couldn’t exactly get a true high key image without totally blowing out the highlights. Fortunately I took a couple of EV bracketed sets and found an image without to much clipping of the shadows and without excessive blown out whites. So all I had to do was use some tonal adjustments. Classic tonal curve stuff and yet an artist would not approach the task in such a mathematical way. I have come to like the basic tonal sliders in lightroom (highlights, shadows, whites & black, these are much simpler to understand in terms of controlling tone of your image). I’ve even found that clicking on one of the tonal ranges in the histogram itself. and sliding the histogram, also moves the corrsponding sliders. So I eased the histogram over to the right (to create the high-key) and lifted clarity and vibrance to keep the colour. The background and my figure had significantly different contrast/tonal ranges so I started to use layers to separate foreground and background and soon got the idea of re-sampling the background layer in corel painter with an impressionist brush. Then using perfect layers to merge the layers back together to give me a very hybrid self portrait this week.
